As this new documentary on
the pioneering primatologist Jane Goodall opens, we see footages of
exotic-looking caterpillars crawling across the screen. With Goodall's primly
accented narration in the background, we see her twenty-six year-old self,
blond hair bound in a ponytail, unassumingly clad in short pants and khaki
shirts, sauntering around in what is today's Gombe National Park in Tanzania.
She occasionally glimpses at the camera and favors it with shy, knowing smiles.
Goodall, in these precious time-capsule records, taken by her first husband,
the Dutch nobleman and nature cameraman Hugo Van Lawick, is a hauntingly
ethereal presence, looking so unspoiled and innocent that one is momentarily
thrown for a loop. The uncanny sense of an entirely new perspective taking
shape, of someone fearlessly, or rather innocuously traversing into what had
hitherto been forbidden to the mankind, is palpable. In the course of their
activities and married life together, Van Lawick produced nearly 140 hours of
16mm film footages recording every imaginable aspect of Goodall's research and
chimpanzee behavior, a very small portion of it had been incorporated into the
fifty-minute-long 1965 National Geographic's "wildlife documentary" Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees,
narrated by Orson Welles.

The documentary, directed
by Brett Morgen (The Kid Stays in the
Picture [2002], Chicago 10 [2007]
and most recently Cobain: Montage of Heck
[2015]), almost immediately displays its color, that it is not at all going to
be like Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees,
or for that matter the Nat Geo's usual nature docus, despite its prominent
company logo. Jane is first and
foremost an exploration of Jane Goodall as a young, fearless and, as she
herself is quite ready to admit, ignorant-in-the-ways-of-academia researcher,
bereft of even a bachelor's degree, commented on with the wisdom of hindsight
but not much irony by her octogenarian self of today. As such, itincludes a surprising amount of
personal details about her life, with her former husband Van Lawick's camera
voraciously, and at times lyrically and heartbreakingly, taking in the
extraordinary texture and feel of the experiences she, her family members and
her students had had studying the African chimps.

For sure, Morgen and Goodall do
not censor themselves regarding the difficulties, disappointments and dark
aspects of her findings and their seismic impact on the world. Jane does a great job showing how the
global media responded to her works, to the observation, for instance, that
chimps could manipulate tools-- the now-famous behavior of using hay straws to
catch termites-- and to her femaleness and youth as if they were defining
character traits (as you could easily imagine, more than one "Me Tarzan,
You Jane" jokes were printed as news headlines reporting on her research).
Goodall herself had to have her perhaps almost unconscious idealization of the
chimps as creatures "just like us, only not as evil" painfully
challenged when they at one point engaged in a vicious tribal warfare. However,
she was certainly not naïve about their nature, as when the Van Lawicks had to
build what amounted to be a large cage to protect her infant son Hugo,
affectionately called "Grub," since, as Goodall readily acknowledges,
the chimps are meat eaters and would sometimes grab and eat the young of other
family members.

Jane also quietly details the dark episode of a polio epidemic that decimated a
large number of chimp population at one point, and Goodall's controversial
decision to put one of the oldest chimps, heartbreakingly deteriorating from
the incapacitation of his legs, to death. She fiercely defends her decision
against the view that she should have let "the nature take its
course." Indeed, Goodall has been accused of treating the Gombe chimpanzees
"too much like humans," giving them names such as
"Greybeard," "Flo" and "Frodo," instead of serial
numbers identifying them as specimens, for instance. It is clear, though, that
Morgen and the elder Goodall are fully aware of the dangers of
"Disney-fying" these wild animals. Jane's defense of her pioneering
research work remains measured, thoughtful and resolutely non-ideological. At
no point does she come off as the kind of animal activist who resorts to
emotional blackmail or guilt-trip based on people's bourgeois consumption
habits to push her agenda. She remains, despite the controversies about
methodologies and other matters she had to endure, and the positively
superhuman amount of public advocacy she had engaged over the last fifty years,
a scientist first and foremost, and the documentary never really loses sight of
that core fact.

Jane's team of editors and archivists has done a superb job of restoring and
integrating Van Lawick's decades-old footage (which he shot for the National
Geographic Society) into the newly lensed and animated sections recreating
Goodall's field notes, illustrations and news headlines (Jane is, among its numerous honors received, the 2018 winner of the
Best Documentary Eddie Award given by the American Cinema Editors Association).
Some stylistic choices are rather obvious, such as the "chimp war"
footages being presented in black and white, but those come with the territory,
I suppose. Compared to, say, those of Alexandra Dean's Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, Jane's stylizations comes off as less ironic if no less
sophisticated.

The great advantage the
film enjoys in relation to similar works is Philip Glass's propulsive score,
whose simultaneously contemplative and exultant music adds enormously to the
quasi-spiritual, out-of-this-world quality of the archival footages. It is also
a perfect complement to the lilting, poised but strong and committed narration
from Goodall herself.

In the end, the most
important choice Morgen made was to refuse to make Jane a story of "Jane and Her Chimps." This is not a
"nature documentary" as you usually imagine one to be, as, even
though you could learn a lot about chimp behavior and would certainly be
exposed to some extraordinarily beautiful and stunning shots of the African
chimps in their natural habitat, it is solidly focused on Goodall as a young
female adventurer, a loving but imperfect (and therefore most human) mother, a
fierce public advocate, but ultimately, a scientist who, following her
instincts rather than academic conventions, helped the mankind redefine the
meaning of its own "humanity."